Our View: All of a sudden, City Council is qualified to help run schools?

Call it public service. Call it showboating. Call it meddling.

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southcoasttoday.com

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Posted Feb. 20, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 20, 2014 at 10:04 AM

Posted Feb. 20, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 20, 2014 at 10:04 AM

» Social News

Call it public service. Call it showboating. Call it meddling.

Call it whatever you want, but understand this: The New Bedford City Council has decided that it is both empowered and qualified to help run the city's public schools.

Regardless that the state's education reform laws were enacted precisely to spare the public schools from the sort of politicking that city councils everywhere are so good at.

It probably was inevitable that this would happen once the camel slipped his nose under the tent a year ago with the school department discovery that it had a $3 million budget problem and had to turn to the City Council for help in squaring its books.

What followed was an agreement to bring School Committee and City Council members together to review the schools' spending practices. That was understandable in light of the decades of shoddy financial practices, non-existent personnel records and archaic business systems that led to the schools' financial crisis in the first place.

But because budgets are so closely aligned with any organization's mission, policy and practices, we all should have seen what was coming.

The New Bedford Educators Association, which represents the city's teachers, is in hand-to-hand combat against new Superintendent Pia Durkin and has demonstrated it will use almost any means available to wound her politically. A friend of the NBEA shopped a 2012 smart phone video showing a fight between two girls at New Bedford High. A Providence television station, which probably needed a map to find New Bedford High School, used it to showcase a story that essentially blamed Durkin for violence against teachers at New Bedford High School. The station did so despite the fact that there were more assaults the year before Durkin was hired — as this newspaper found in its review of violent incidents at the school and which Police Chief Dave Provencher confirmed.

Enter City Council members Brian Gomes and Steve Martins, who at first tried to have the council meet secretly with anyone who wanted to complain about what was going on in the high school until the council was reminded that the state's Open Meeting Law forbids public boards from secret meetings just because councilors think it's a good idea.

So they decided to do the meeting in public.

"If no one is going to address the issue, I'm going to address the issue," crowed Brian Gomes, who has long made public safety a top concern.

Still, it's unclear why Gomes considers that the issue is being ignored, given that more police officers are spending more time at the school and that a number of trouble-making students were kicked out.

That probably matters a lot less than that what the council sees as good politics. Several councilors, including Gomes, were on the steps of City Hall during an NBEA rally last month, while Martins sent a message of support. The rally was held as a protest against Durkin and Mayor Jon Mitchell over a plan to adopt a tough turnaround model of governance at the high school — a rally that took place despite the fact that an agreement between Durkin and the leadersship of the NBEA had already been reached.

Public employee unions are a powerful voting bloc and financial force in municipal election campaigns, which is why the council voted 10-1 to move the motion along and schedule a public hearing on the issue of school violence at a future date.

Only one member of the council, new Ward 4 Councilor Dana Rebeiro, voted against the majority.

"Bullying, or students defying teachers, did not start this year or last year," she said.

And neither did the sort of meddling that this move by the City Council represents.

But that was the price the School Committee had to pay for the financial mess it found itself in a year ago back when interim superintendent Mike Shea and his team uncovered it.

And that was way before the leaders of the New Bedford Educators Association decided that their ends would justify almost any means in their battle with a tough-minded superintendent who is trying to make real changes in the operation of the long-struggling New Bedford public schools.